The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel eBook

chatted of old days at boarding-school and college,
and this contact with the large, healthy nature of
Flemming, which threw off depression as sunshine dissipates
mist, had sent Lynde’s vapors flying. Nothing
was changed in the circumstances that had distressed
him, yet some way a load had removed itself from his
bosom. He was sorry he had mentioned that dark
business at all. As he threaded the deserted streets—­it
was long after midnight—­he planned a dinner
to be given in his rooms the next day, and formulated
a note of invitation to the ladies, which he would
write when he got back to the hotel, and have in readiness
for early delivery in the morning.

Lynde was in one of those lightsome moods which, in
that varying month, had not unfrequently followed
a day of doubt and restless despondency. As he
turned into the Quai des Bergues he actually hummed
a bar or two of opera. He had not done that before
in six weeks. They had been weeks of inconceivable
torment and pleasure to Lynde.

He had left home while still afflicted by David Lynde’s
death. Since the uncle’s ill-advised marriage
the intercourse between them, as the reader knows,
had all but ceased; they had met only once, and then
as if to bid each other farewell; but the ties had
been very close, after all. In the weeks immediately
following his guardian’s death, the young man,
occupied with settling the estate, of which he was
one of the executors, scarcely realized his loss;
but when he returned to Rivermouth a heavy sense of
loneliness came over him. The crowded, happy firesides
to which he was free seemed to reproach him for his
lack of kinship; he stood alone in the world; there
was no more reason why he should stay in one place
than in another. His connection with the bank,
unnecessary now from a money point of view, grew irksome;
the quietude of the town oppressed him; he determined
to cut adrift from all and go abroad. An educated
American with no deeper sorrow than Lynde’s cannot
travel through Europe, for the first time at least,
with indifference. Three months in Germany and
France began in Lynde a cure which was completed by
a winter in Southern Italy. He had regained his
former elasticity of spirits and was taking life with
a relish, when he went to Geneva; there he fell in
with the Denhams in the manner he described to Flemming.
An habitual shyness, and perhaps a doubt of Flemming’s
sympathetic capacity, had prevented Lynde from giving
his friend more than an outline of the situation.
In his statement Lynde had omitted several matters
which may properly be set down here.

That first day at the table d’hote and the next
day, when he was able more deliberately to study the
young woman, Edward Lynde had made no question to
himself as to her being the same person he had seen
in so different and so pathetic surroundings.
It was unmistakably the same. He had even had
a vague apprehension she might recognize him, and had
been greatly relieved to observe that there was no